Overt Peace, Covert War?: Covert Intervention and the Democratic Peace

• Published in: Security studies Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 266 - 306
• Main Authors: Downes, Alexander B., Lilley, Mary Lauren
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Taylor & Francis Group 01.05.2010; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Case studies; Chile; Covert operations; Democracy; Democratic countries; Democratic Peace Theory; Empirical research; Empirical tests; Government information; Hypotheses; International relations theory; Intervention; Legal norms; Military Intervention; Peace; Risk aversion; Subversion; Theory; U.S.A; Chile; United States > US
• ISSN: 0963-6412; 1556-1852
• DOI: 10.1080/09636411003795756

Proponents and critics of the democratic peace have debated the extent to which covert attempts by democracies to overthrow other elected governments are consistent with or contradict democratic peace theory. The existing debate, however, fails to acknowledge that there are multiple democratic peace theories and that inter-democratic covert intervention might have different implications for different arguments. In this article, we first distill hypotheses regarding covert foreign regime change from three theories of democratic peace. Relying primarily on declassified government documents, we then investigate these hypotheses in the context of U.S. covert intervention in Chile (1970-73). The evidence suggests that covert intervention is highly inconsistent with norms and checks-and-balances theories of democratic peace. The evidence is more consistent with selectorate theory, but questions remain because democratic leaders undertook interventions with a low likelihood of success and a high likelihood that failure would be publicized, which would constitute exactly the type of policy failure that democratic executives supposedly avoid.